full of dirty brothels where lust feeds itself forever joylessly. There are also dark forests, sandy deserts, scraggy cliffs, black mines and caves. There seems to be fire, both smoky and flaming, but it is not such as can be felt by the inhabitants, Swedenborg says. It is correspondence with their self-love.
His eighteenth-century reader would probably have been as much troubled by "correspondence," one of Swedenborg's favorite words, as is his twentieth-century reader. It was correspondence that evil, false, haughty, tricky spirits lived in caves and darkness and filthy places. It was correspondence that those who had lived "in heavenly love out of affection for truth" spent their spirit-life in bright light on beautiful mountains in spring; that they saw "represented" before them meadows and fields of corn and vineyards and olive groves; that their rooms gleamed as if with precious stones; that they looked through windows as if through purest crystal.
It was likewise correspondence that those who had loved science and used it to develop their reason with, and to acknowledge the divine, now lived in symmetric gardens with artfully trimmed trees, where trees and flowers daily went through beautiful changes. It was for the same reason that those who had given the divine all credit and who had regarded nature by itself as comparatively dead now lived in the light of a heaven where, all things being as if transparent for them, they saw infinite changes and gradations of heavenly radiance. In their houses shone a diamond light, their walls seemed of transparent crystal in which they saw an everchanging flow of beautiful things.
Swedenborg's friends must have shaken their heads over this mysterious "correspondence" that turned up everywhere in what he now wrote, both about the other world and about the Bible. Nor puzzled only by that. There were many strange allusions to the "Grand Man," and to visits to other planets, or casual mention of the Last Judgment having taken place in Swedenborg's observant presence. But especially "correspondence" gleamed and darkened everywhere. It seemed to be a world-principle, so ubiquitous and bewildering that it had to be confronted if one would understand Swedenborg.
And that was difficult, not to say impossible, on the basis of the
